The Guardian view on the Welsh language: the unmaking and making of a nation

Jeremy Bowen has spent almost three decades reporting on the Middle East. He is no stranger to division and disputation. But his recent assignment – a three-part series on Radio 4 in which he made “a personal journey through Wales”, the country of his birth – must still have left him a little shellshocked. Bowen, born in Cardiff but domiciled in England and a non-Welsh speaker, did that most dangerous thing – he attacked what he saw as the way the Welsh-speaking minority in Wales dominates the cultural conversation. This argument has not gone down well in the land of his fathers.

The Welsh online media has suggested this is the view from Camberwell, where Bowen lives, rather than Criccieth – a journalist’s whistlestop tour of a country he last resided in more than 40 years ago. Fellow BBC journalist and evangelical Welsh speaker Huw Edwards echoed that criticism: “We are all products of upbringing – this take is 1970s Cardiff.” Edwards was even ruder about a parallel attack on Welsh, headlined “Tacsi for a moribund language”, by Jonathan Meades in the current issue of The Critic. “So long as it’s a hobby language it is as harmless as a Sunday painter,” wrote Meades. “But in pockets of Snowdonia and mid-Wales it is a tool not only of communication but of identity and exclusivity, thus of self-harm and curtailment.” To which Edwards curtly responded: “Meades is a brilliant writer and I have enjoyed his work over many years. I can only assume he’s skint. Nothing else can explain this bilge.”

A tongue re-emerged as deindustrialisation and devolution took root – and that is beneficial to the rest of the UK ‘Welsh-speaking Wales is not responsible for the travails of English-speaking Wales, and the two have to find a way to coexist.’ Photograph: Alamy BBC foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen has spent almost three decades...